Of Bees and Mist

by Erick Setiawan

  Meridia narrowed her eyes dangerously. “Do you mean me? Are you saying my father could no longer stand my mother because she gave birth to me?”

  Pilar stopped scratching and reared her head back in shock. “Whoever gave you that idea? You really believe he—My dear, you were just a baby! How could a grown man blame an infant for his mistakes?”

  She regarded Meridia with a tenderness that seemed at odds with the cloying lilac. Tears accrued from years of abandonment snaked up Meridia’s throat, but before they could find a way to betray her, she choked them back with all she had.

  “What tore them apart then?”

  Pilar did not hesitate before replying. “Their love.”

  Meridia’s laugh rang chillingly in the morning air. “Are you insane?”

  “Don’t you see? They are both extreme and exacting creatures. When they love, it is so complete that they tolerate no defects. Ask them to die for each other and they would drag a sword across their throats without hesitation. But ask them to blunt their edges, to endure arguments and daily imperfections, and they would despise each other to no end. It must have happened soon after you were born, this disillusionment, and somehow they believed it had killed their love for good. But the fact that they chose to stay under one roof when they had the means to separate should tell you something. I suppose that after everything had been stripped bare, another kind of love matured between them. Frail at first, deformed by confusion and disappointment, but it was there, and it grew stronger with time. All these years I thought I had won him, but now I know it’s your mother he’s always loved. I gave him body and soul, my youth and my devotion, but to him I was never anything more than a comfort. When the ice got him, it was your mother he wanted to see. To save face, he ordered me to bar her from the house, but why did you think he wanted to wear his best suit? And that gardenia, too? When I realized he had betrayed me, I went mad with anger. I tried—though I failed, I tried—”

  Suddenly Pilar broke off and dissolved into tears. “May heaven forgive me.”

  “What is it you’ve done?” Meridia softened her voice but did not relent her stare.

  “I tried to keep your mother away from him.” Pilar was scratching, scratching. “I tore up the note—the last thing he wrote her—and scattered the pieces to the wind the same night the ice began to cover him. I didn’t read it, but I knew exactly what he would write to get her to come. You can imagine my shock when your mother said she received the note. I knew then that even the wind and the mist were conspiring to bring them together.”

  The steel quickly crept back into Meridia’s voice. “You were content to let him die without seeing his wife?”

  Pilar cast her a guilty look. “Don’t think meanly of me. You were always so kind to me, so generous. What you did for my sister—”

  “Did Patina know about my father?”

  Still scratching, Pilar lowered her head as if her thoughts had become too heavy. “I kept it from her. She always thought I was a decent woman—poor but honorable.”

  A groan exploded from Meridia. “How can you be poor when you have my father’s money at your disposal? In fact, why didn’t you ask him to pay for Patina’s surgery? Why did you have to come to me, of all people, and make me give up what little I had?”

  Tears came flooding down Pilar’s cheeks. “It’s not like that. Your father never gave me more than what was necessary. You’ve seen the house I live in.”

  Meridia thought back to the dingy little cottage in the dark alley. It was indeed strange that Gabriel should have lived in such a place.

  “He didn’t want me to have a better life than your mother. In fact, he made sure that I lived much worse.”

  “Why? To punish you?”

  “To punish himself. For the man he allowed himself to become.”

  “By making everyone else miserable? Is that his idea of punishing himself?”

  Pilar sighed tiredly. “Some men can only love from a distance. But in his own way, he always tried to set things right.”

  “How?” flared Meridia suddenly. “What has he tried to set right? Tell me one selfless, generous thing he’s done in the past twenty years! Go on, I dare you!”

  Her anger, long buried without a name, shocked her with its intensity. In a flash she relived Gabriel’s countless abuses, his contempt and petty persecutions, the hand he had cruelly withdrawn when to offer it would cost him nothing and comfort her greatly. It was too much to bear, too painful to remember. Red and breathless, she almost spat the words in Pilar’s face: “Go on, tell me!”

  Gabriel’s mistress was watching her intently. “I promised him I’d never tell. But who do you think gave you those gold bars? And all that money on your doorstep?”

  Meridia’s jaw dropped open. “The gold…? They weren’t from my mother?”

  Pilar shook her head. “I delivered them myself, and those envelopes, too, every time he learned your mother had gone to visit you. Sprayed her perfume on the gold bars himself. Don’t you see? You take up a bigger space in his heart than I ever did.”

  The last words hung between them like a knife. Neither one could bring herself to look the other in the eye. By then the sun was climbing rapidly, raking the earth with silvery blades of light. With no more mists to haunt them, the stone steps sparkled like freshly polished jewels.

  “Why did you stay with him?” Meridia forced the question out.

  “I love him,” said Pilar in tears. “Please. Let me see him one last time.”

  Meridia shook her head firmly but without resentment. “You owe this to my mother. You’ve had your time with him. Let her have hers.”

  All at once Pilar’s face caved in upon itself. “You won’t let me see him?”

  Meridia met her eyes and said nothing more.

  Shuddering, Patina’s sister turned and shambled down the stone steps. For a moment she seemed to be melting into the sun, shedding a brighter and brighter brilliance until it eclipsed her whole. But Meridia knew better. Pilar was going where Patina had gone. The suspicion had crossed her mind before, and now she understood it clearly. Pilar had orchestrated Patina’s surgery not so much as a means to cure her heart, but as an act of mercy to deliver her from Eva. Whatever sleight of sorcery Pilar had used to elevate her sister into the world of the spirits, she would now unleash upon herself. As Meridia watched the frail figure blur into transparency, she knew it was the last time she would ever see Pilar on this earth.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Rumors ran rampant in Independence Plaza. Speculations swirled at Cinema Garden. At the market square people shook their heads and rolled their eyes. For weeks the rumors hatched, then at once flapped their wings and rode the wind to Magnolia Avenue. Cordoning the two units that housed the jewelry shop, they splattered the roof with droppings, shed feathers all over the garden, and coated the windows with the grime of scandal.

  Despite the maid’s complaints that the garden had become a veritable shitting ground for invisible birds, Meridia did not notice it. It was Daniel who brought the matter to her attention. Since she began to divide her time between Monarch Street and Magnolia Avenue, an unspoken tension had manifested between them. He disapproved of her spending so many hours away from home, neglecting the shop and leaving him and the assistant to do her work.

  “People are talking,” he said, frowning at their filthy living room windows.

  At the table, Meridia paused from correcting Noah’s composition. “About what?”

  “Your mother. How long does she intend to keep this going? Customers are pestering me with questions.”

  She stiffened visibly, then resumed her correction. “Let them. They’ll tire of it soon enough.”

  Daniel slowly turned to face her. “Do you understand what your mother is doing?”

  Meridia looked at him with bafflement. “My father is ill. If I were in her place, I would behave the same.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’m sure I’ll be long gone before it comes t
o that.”

  The disquiet festered. A few days later, Noah, who was in his second year of primary schooling, came home with a black eye. While Meridia tended to him with a pack of ice, the boy furiously related what had happened. A classmate had taunted him in the schoolyard by yelling, “Don’t let Noah’s grandmother bite you! She’s crazier than a mad dog!” Outraged for his beloved Ravenna, the delicate boy knocked his friend flat in two blows, but not before one landed on his right eye. A teacher intervened, but did not chastise the classmate when she learned the cause of the fight.

  “Is it true, Mama?”

  Meridia lifted the ice and examined the bruise closely. Meeting it just above the eye was Elias’s scar, pulsing red and feverish as the boy waited for an answer.

  “Of course not,” she said. “The last thing your grandma will lose is her mind.”

  Later at dinner, Noah told his father about the fight. Giving Meridia a look she would not soon forget, Daniel told her, “Do something before it’s too late.” She bit her lip and continued eating as if she had not heard him.

  The person who finally spurred her into action was Eva. One afternoon in March, while the day was still redolent with sunlight, Meridia was packing tin boxes with food to take to Monarch Street when she heard Eva’s disgust boom across the market square, shoot up past trees and rooftops, ricochet off clouds, thunder toward her kitchen, aim for the only open window, and punch her directly in the gut.

  “At least I know better than to keep mounting a man who’s got no breath left in his body!”

  Meridia dropped the tin boxes. Pale and reeling, she stumbled into the street and set off toward Monarch Street.

  “What’s the matter, child?” cried Ravenna as soon as she entered the house.

  Meridia did not reply but staggered up the stairs, burst into the room at the end of the corridor, and forced herself to confront the figure stretched upon the bed. For the first time since they took him home six months ago, she was able to see Gabriel clearly. Face blue and swollen. Nostrils whiskered like a seal’s. Scales crowding every inch of skin. Odor of an alien sea. In horror, she realized he looked more suitable for water than land.

  Her eyes smarted as she recalled the doomsayers. “He will neither improve nor worsen,” said one doctor. “Scrape the ice all you want but there’s no life left inside that body.” “Do as you wish,” said another, “but to let him go will be a mercy.” Overriding them was Ravenna’s imperturbable voice. “What do those fools know? One of these days, your father will open his eyes and become the same insufferable old ass.”

  Six months had now passed. Autumn had turned into spring. While the trees sprouted new leaves and the flowers new blossoms, the figure on the bed had not revived. Every day mother and daughter pumped milk into the tube that snaked through Gabriel’s throat. Every morning they bathed him, cleaned the little waste he secreted, and rubbed eucalyptus oil on his skin to keep him warm. In the afternoon, Meridia massaged his limbs, which had grown heavy as timber, while Ravenna tried method after method in her almanac to stop the ice.

  How long could they go on like this? And to what end?

  Ravenna herself looked worn down. Though she upheld her conviction that Gabriel would recover, she seldom went out of the house anymore, relying instead on Meridia to run her errands. She slept no more than two hours each night, pecked at her food, and, save for her iron back and implacable knot, had become as insubstantial as a shadow. Not for the first time Meridia wondered if her mother’s persistence was simply a stubbornness fueled by illusion, a wayward unwillingness to accept what others had foreseen as inevitable.

  She did not budge from the sickbed when Ravenna followed her into the room. Clearing her mind of thoughts, she looked at her father without flinching. Give me a sign, Papa. Tell me what to do. She took his cold hand and pressed it between her own. She willed it to lift, to strike, to shiver, anything but this slimy amphibian immobility. She stroked the mottled scales that covered his fingers and could not decide if it was blood rumbling in his veins or the roar of the alien sea. With her other hand she pressed his brow gently, hoping something indissoluble would pierce her with certainty. As tears came and smudged her vision, she told herself that he would squeeze her hand if he wished to stay, and no matter how feeble, she would feel the pressure of his will.

  Gabriel remained still in his bed, Ravenna behind Meridia. In the planters, the burning logs shot opalescent flames into the air. The room had no breeze but many animate shadows. Meridia counted to one hundred, then two hundred. Nothing happened. She was on the verge of releasing her father’s hand when she heard it. The familiar puffing voice of her old nurse coming from the window.

  Look here.

  Meridia turned. Outside the window hovered the three mists—blue, yellow, ivory—banded together for the first time in memory. At once she remembered her dream from long ago, when the good woman was saying good-bye. The next time you see them together…

  All the hairs on Meridia’s arms stood up.

  “Papa’s gone, Mama,” she said at length. “Set him free.”

  Startled out of reverie, Ravenna laughed dismissively. “Don’t be silly, child. That old fool isn’t going anywhere. Oh, look how thick the ice has grown. Quick, hand me that brush.”

  Meridia shook her head as tears dropped from her lashes. “It’s time, Mama. Set him free.”

  Ravenna fetched the wire brush from the nightstand. Meridia placed herself in front of her mother and wrenched the object away.

  “No! Leave him alone.”

  “Are you mad?” cried Ravenna. They struggled. Surprised by her own strength, Meridia locked her arms around her mother and flung the brush across the room. Kicking and cursing, Ravenna fought like a woman possessed, but Meridia was too strong for her. They wept as they grappled, their screams exposing all the wounds that time was powerless to heal. Then with a roar something smashed the window. A thousand glass shards rained down on their bodies. The two women tumbled to the floor while the three mists wheeled like mad birds into the room.

  A sharp pain cleaved Meridia’s heart. Amid the toss and whirl she caught Gabriel’s eyes flicker for the last time. “No!” Ravenna was crying. The mists jumped on the bed, shoved their talons into Gabriel’s chest, and ripped the cord between worlds. Rocking and weeping, Meridia kept her arms locked around her mother. In the next instant the mists were off, carrying with them the mass of a reborn soul—peaceful now, pure and majestic—borne upward in a density of wings.

  Ravenna made no more sound or movement, as if she, too, had been infected by the ice. Her bleeding arms hung without strength, and her neck gave the ghoulish impression that it had been snapped. Carefully, Meridia sat her down in a chair. She spoke to her as she picked the glass from her flesh, and when no answer came, she set to shaking her vigorously. It did not take her long to notice that something had faded from Ravenna’s eyes.

  A WEEK AFTER THE funeral, Meridia braved herself to enter her father’s study. Without Gabriel, the towers of books looked unremarkable, the massive desk no grimmer than a toothless hound. In six months, no one had tidied the mess Ravenna had made when she was last here. The shattered beakers lolled in the dust. The overturned tables pleaded for a restitution. There were shreds of clothes fluttering everywhere, incredulous still, it seemed, at Ravenna’s fit of anger.

  Meridia began her task by throwing the windows open. A crisp morning breeze flooded the sepulchral room, but did little to mitigate the stench of neglect. After she rid the floor of debris and righted the tables, she turned to the documents in the desk drawers. Over the next four hours, she tracked Gabriel’s investments across two continents and seven nations, and in this way learned the true state of his finances. She took turns frowning and grimacing, and by noon came to an unfavorable conclusion—her father had much less money than anybody had suspected. All her life she had imagined some powerful beast residing inside his bankbook, smashing down doors and assuring his status in the eye of the town. N
ow she saw it was no great beast at all. Apart from the house and a modest sum of money, Ravenna would have little to rely on.

  This revelation soon paled in the face of another: Given his financial condition, it must have cost Gabriel no small sacrifice to part with the two gold bars, not to mention the money in the envelopes. Feeling a sudden heaviness, Meridia bowed her head. He had loved her after all. In his own way, he had tried to set things right. There in that room where he had taught her terror at a very early age, she began to forgive the man she had understood so little.

  The study concealed yet another surprise. As Meridia was sorting the thousands of books into boxes, she discovered that a great number of them were not scientific texts as Gabriel had led everyone to believe, but much perused treatises on resurrecting a love long dead. One whole shelf was devoted to writings on trespass and atonement, another to elaborate formularies on annihilating grief and enmity. Gabriel’s notes cluttered the margins of many, and these faded words revealed his pain more than any confession he had made in life. In the end it was her face he wanted to see, Pilar had said. Sadly and reverently, Meridia returned these volumes to the shelves.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, the town was scandalized by tales of Ravenna scavenging the streets in broad daylight. Witnesses said she rambled aimlessly from one avenue to another, strapped inside a stiff mourning dress from another age that barely exposed her face. She spoke to no one, though her lips moved without cease, and her panicked eyes darted to and fro without catching the phantom they pursued. She looked ill and extraordinarily pale, and many who offered her water wondered how she managed not to suffocate in that punishing dress.

  The following Monday, Leah brought Meridia news that an urchin at the market square had witnessed Ravenna sharing a meal with an enormous black beast. On Wednesday, Rebecca claimed that Ravenna had been spotted leading a white colt by the halter while waving a palm branch over its head. On Friday, Noah confessed that two boys in his class had seen a blind woman with snake hair sitting outside the school gate. She had laughed and licked her lips when they petted the vipers in her hair.